


Exploration

by YukiSkyes



Series: Tales From the Mountains of Odvirkast [5]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dragons, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-09
Updated: 2017-03-09
Packaged: 2018-10-01 11:33:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10189031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YukiSkyes/pseuds/YukiSkyes
Summary: A test run of of her golem leads Pidge to a cave full of the mysterious crystal she also used in the creation of Rover. What were they anyway?





	

After weeks of painstaking hours laboring over the enchantments, Pidge was finally finished.

Rover was a small, round golem made of rock about the size of Pidge’s head with a single eye made from a bit of a clear, shining blue crystal she’d found and never seen before, and he moved by floating through the air.

He was made to sense magical energies and life signatures and to recognize what or who they were. He was even able to manipulate the energies to some degree as long as it wasn’t complicated. With this, Rover would be able to detect traces of where her family had gone and follow them. He was her greatest masterpiece yet, if she did say so herself, and she loved him.

Now to test him out.

First, she had him track her whistle. After a few seconds examining it, eye blinking greenish white as he did so, Rover moved away with a few bird-like chirps and Pidge followed.

Shiro was at the lake bathing, unbothered by how frigid the water still was despite the steadily warming weather.

Pidge took a moment to wave at him before moving on. She’ll show him more of Rover later.

Next she had Rover try to track down something a little harder and presented him with Keith’s whetstone.

It took a great deal longer this time to locate him, with a lot of detours and loops, but they did eventually find him checking the traps. Red wasn’t with him, but she was definitely around.

Pidge grinned as she gave him the stone back to which Keith shot her an annoyed look and a grunt of, “Parakeet,” before leaving.

Well, she’d say the tests were a resounding success but now came the ultimate one.

Pidge slowly withdrew two feathers from her satchel, one a green darker than Pidge’s own and the other one a speckled gray. They were keepsakes Matt and her dad had given her before they left, a charm for their travels, so to speak. Feathers given to loved ones before a journey was considered good luck because it meant there was someone who was thinking about them, someone to return to, and the spirits would protect them.

Now, on an expedition that should’ve only taken six months, they’ve disappeared…

Pidge shook herself out of it. No, she had to have faith they were okay, that Shiro would’ve been able to tell if something bad happened to them.

Turning, she held up the feathers to Rover and waited with bated breath as he scanned them.

After a while, his eye stopped blinking and he floated a distance past Pidge, stopped, and then drifted towards the right.

It… didn’t seem too promising, but Pidge followed him nonetheless. Life signatures were significantly weaker than magical energy and she didn’t know whether the trail would’ve faded or wiped away after so long but there was always a chance and it didn’t hurt to try it out at least. No sense quitting before even starting.

Rover took her to a meadow, an interesting rock formation, wandered alongside a cliff for a while, up a tree, stopped to stare at a waterfall, then double-backed to the stump they’ve circled to four times already. While they’re all very nice and scenic, it wasn’t what she was looking for.

At this point, Rover was just meandering as he liked and Pidge let out a loud sigh as she shuffled along behind her golem, kicking up some rocks on the way.

Yeah, this was a failure.

She tried not to feel too disappointed by that. It was a long shot anyway.

This time, Rover had led her to a cave, which he gamely entered, unconcerned with whether something a lot less welcoming to invasions of its home than Keith was could be occupying it.

At this point, she wanted to give up and scavenge what was left of the day to do something preferably productive but hey, why not. She was here anyway and caves could have interesting things inside and a spot of spelunking never hurt anyone. Un… less it hosted an aforementioned something-a-lot-less-welcoming, but Pidge didn’t really care. It’s just… why not.

The cave got darker the further in they went but it wasn’t really a problem between the glow that came from Rover’s eye and her whistle.

The entrance was initially large and wide, but it eventually funneled in a straight line with its walls rather close together, kind of like a hallway.

It sloped down and then continued on.

This was very exciting. Pidge could hardly contain her exhilaration.

“Alright, Rover. Time to—”

Without warning, Rover whizzed ahead, almost disappearing into the darkness save a pinprick of light but even that was rapidly fading as well.

“Rover! Hey!”

Pidge gave chase to her wayward golem.

The cave passage eventually widened around her and in the distance, she could see a turquoise glow that engulfed Rover’s own light.

As she came closer, the glow began to resolve themselves into crystals growing and embedded in the walls, floors, and ceiling, brilliant and beautiful.

Rover had slowed, allowing Pidge to catch up and she doubled over bracing her hands against her thighs in order to catch her breath.

“Wow,” she panted, nonetheless admiring her surroundings.

They were the exact color of the shard of crystal she found so long ago and which now made up Rover’s eye. Was this what drew him here? Maybe the pull of the crystals were stronger than her family’s life signatures.

Pidge reached out slowly and tentatively put her fingers to one of the crystals.

A power hummed beneath her touch, gentle and warm. Just like the fragment she found in the forest, the crystals here also didn’t emit any energy. Instead, it was all confined within. She wouldn’t have known these crystals held magical energy until she touched them.

Pidge knew from studying the shard that it not only had a _lot_ of energy for something so small, enough energy to power Rover for years, it was also highly flexible and vastly capable of containing a lot of information, which allowed her to work _all_ her enchantments into it as well. Extremely rarely was there a crystal that was high energy, high storage, _and_ highly flexible. It was practically unheard of, in fact. And if only a piece of it could make something as revolutionarily complex as Rover possible without resorting to needing separate sources of power and enchantments, she wondered what a bigger crystal was capable of.

Well, the search for her family might’ve been a bust but at least she wasn’t going home completely empty-handed.

Pidge found a crystal the size of her hand and plucked it from the wall after some effort prying it away, tucking it safely into her satchel for further study.

Rover chirped, catching her attention.

Oh right, she almost forgot he was there.

Before Pidge could suggest going home once more, Rover floated away deeper into the cave and she groaned. “Again?”

At least he wasn’t zooming away this time and allowed Pidge to follow at a leisurely pace.

“What’re you trying to show me?” she asked. Maybe there was something else incredible further in. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the crystals he wanted to show her.

Rover didn’t respond.

They passed by many more crystals until finally, he stopped. He’d have no choice but to stop because it was a dead end and for all his functions, intangibility was not one of them.

Rover chirped in rapid succession and flew up to the dead end.

“Something about the wall?”

Pidge walked up to it as well and began feeling around it with both her hands.

It was cool under her touch, kind of rough and bumpy as cave walls usually were, and slightly curved towards the center. The light of the crystals didn’t reveal anything on its face and it wasn’t emitting any magical energy Pidge could detect. She tried sending a pulse of magic to it but nothing happened. She flew up and examined it closely all around, but she didn’t see anything strange or out of place with it.

“There’s nothing there,” Pidge finally said, returning to the ground after investigating it for a few minutes more, turning to Rover. “It’s just a wall.”

Rover chirped low in disagreement.

“Well, whatever you’re detecting it’s probably just another crystal and that’s not what I’m really looking for anyway,” Pidge asserted.

Rover chirped again, higher pitched and drawn out this time as if in protest.

“Then what do you want me to do about it?” Pidge asked in exasperation, gesturing to the wall with both hands. “Even if I wanted to dig up whatever’s in there, it’s a wall. I can’t exactly just reach in there and grab it or blast it apart.” She let out a breath, some of her frustration released with it. “Let’s just go home.”

Rover didn’t make any more noise after that and if Pidge didn’t know any better, she’d say he was sulking.

Well, he could sulk all he wanted but it didn’t change the fact that Pidge didn’t have the power to alter reality and make the dead end _not_.

When Pidge emerged from the cave, it was already sunset and she set off back to the cabin where Keith was already there.

“Had fun?” Keith asked as she walked through the door with Rover. Red was nowhere to be seen. She was probably off on her own again.

“A party,” Pidge affirmed, setting her satchel on the table. “We looked at a wall. It was wild.”

Keith laughed softly, the sound lost over the sound of sizzling meat so that the only indication of it was his shaking shoulders.

Pidge smiled at that, feeling her own mood light up a bit.

“How was your day? Hope it wasn’t as crazy as mine was,” she said, hopping onto the badly-repaired chair whose back was held together by sticky resin applied to the cut. It didn’t look pretty but hey, it was functional and that’s all that matters.

Keith shrugged. “Same old. Found an angry barlow caught in one of the traps and fought it off with Red.”

“Cool. Boring, but cool,” Pidge remarked.

A rush of wind outside shaking the windows announced Shiro had come to visit them and Pidge ran outside to meet him.

“Hey, Shiro! Guess what I finally completed?” Pidge quizzed as way of greeting.

“Hmm, I don’t know. What’d you complete?” he teased, lowering his head as per always when talking to them.

“Rover! I finally finished him! Loo—” Empty air met Pidge when she swiveled to gesture at him. “Oh. He’s still mad at me.”

Beside her, Keith blinked in confusion. “Golems could get angry?”

Pidge smiled sheepishly. “Well… Not exactly? I just project emotion onto him.”

“Why is he angry at you, Pidge?” Shiro asked with the barest hint of amusement in his voice.

“We found this cave full of crystals earlier and he led me through all the way to a dead end. He kept insisting I check it out but there’s nothing there. It was weird.” She scratched behind her ear. “I think it’s because the crystals we found there are the same kind of crystal I used to make his eye and core and maybe there was a big one growing on the other side of the wall. I don’t know. I’m going to have to check him out and fix that.”

Shiro seemed interested, eyes alert in the way they focused on her. “What kind of crystal did you find?”  

“I brought one back. Hang on a sec.”

Pidge ran in, grabbed the crystal from her bag, and ran back out, holding out her spoil from the cave.

Shiro and Keith drew closer to get a better look.

“It’s... nice I guess. Does this kind of crystal attract others?” Keith asked, glancing up.

“I don’t know,” Pidge answered, lowering her arm to her side now that they were finished examining the crystal. “I mean, I did study it for its basic properties but maybe there’s something more in there that I missed.”

Pidge turned to Shiro, meaning to ask his opinion. Of anyone in the world, he was the one who would know the most about this crystal seeing as it grew on the mountain he guarded and lived in for, if stories were to be believed, centuries, but when she looked at him, she stopped herself.

Shiro’s gaze was fixed to a spot just to Pidge’s left in contemplation. It was hard to get a read on his expression and until now, she didn’t realize how much Shiro went out of his way to emote the things he felt on a face vastly different from a human’s in order to make it easier for his human friends to understand his reactions and emotions. It was warming to realize how Shiro showed he cared through something so small as much as his current blankness was troubling.

“What’s wrong? Is something the matter?” Pidge couldn’t keep the slight tinge of worry from her tone. Did she inadvertently do something wrong by taking the crystal back with her?

Shiro snapped out of it, eyes flickering over to her, and he smiled, back to his usual self. “No, I was just thinking how it’s been a very long time since I’ve last seen a crystal bigger than a fragment.”

“Oh.” There was more to it and Pidge couldn’t quite keep the note of disbelief from her tone, but she tried to cover it up by rushing along. “Can you tell me about it?”

Shiro hummed, sounding ambivalent. “I’m not sure if anything I tell you isn’t something you don’t already know. In fact, I think you could find out a lot more about it by studying it than asking me... Also, what is that smell? It smells like burning.”

Keith let out a string of loud curses and rushed back inside.

Pidge stared after him for a second before shouting, “Keith! You’d better not have burned our dinner!”

There was a hiss as Keith dumped an entire pail of water there for the express purpose of such an emergency.

“Too late,” came his sullen grumble.

Pidge let out a groan.

Shiro laughed, his mirth coming from deep in his chest and she glared at him.

Yeah, he got to laugh it up because he never had to worry about cooking his meals before eating them.

“I think part of it’s still edible though,” Keith announced, coming back out with Rover surprisingly at his shoulder. He chirped. Looked like somebody’s finally done throwing a tantrum.

“Good, because you’re going to be eating the charred bits,” Pidge informed him. She was not breaking her vow never to go to bed hungry again. Besides, this was completely Keith’s fault. It had nothing to do with revenge.

Keith protested weakly but even he knew he couldn’t win this one.

“Anyway, now I can finally introduce you to Rover!” Pidge beckoned for her golem to come over and greet Shiro. He did with three peppy chirps.

“He’s very well constructed,” Shiro praised, genuinely impressed as he ran his gaze over Rover.

“Yup! He also has a good name to go with his well-constructed-ness.” Pidge shot Keith a smug, pointed look.

His brow crinkled in confusion. “What?”

Apparently, Keith really didn’t think there was anything wrong with naming a red companion Red.

Pidge sighed good-naturedly and patted his arm. “Never mind. Let’s just go have dinner now. We’ll see you later, Shiro.”

Keith nodded at him. “Take care.”

“Have a nice dinner,” Shiro chuckled and flew away, leaving Keith and Pidge to fight over which soggy portions were considered charred and which were considered ash.


End file.
